Starbound Starbound at EGX Rezzed

It’s been a little bit since we gave a development update – I wanted to share the current status and our plans for Starbound over the next few months.

Update 1.4

We started working on update 1.4 and the bounty hunting system late last year. We developed our planned systems and gameplay elements, and spent a long time trying to integrate these new features into the game in a way where they didn’t feel tacked on. After a lot of discussion and experimentation, we came to the conclusion that the bounty hunting, while really fun and exciting in concept, didn’t really feel like it complemented the rest of the game and felt like more of an ‘attached feature’ instead of an enhancement. For now we’ve made the decision to put it on hold – ultimately we don’t want to release an update which doesn’t meet our standards for excitement and fun.

We are still planning to release some smaller scope content updates – and some of what we’ve developed for 1.4 may be featured in those. First we’re going to focus our resources on making sure Starbound on consoles is the best it can be. Which leads into…

Xbox One Release

You may have heard news we’ve been showing off Starbound on Xbox at some events over the past few weeks. It was featured at a press event at GDC in San Francisco, and soon after in London. Just this past weekend we had our first public showing in the [email protected] room at EGX Rezzed in London. It was great to meet so many players and talk to them about our game!

Watching players get their hands on it has been extremely valuable for us, and we’ve been working on making the final adjustments before we feel it’s ready for release.

Porting the controls to console has been a huge task, and has required us to develop some radical UI changes. We’ll provide some specifics on those changes and a date when to expect that very soon!

I was very hopeful that the developers would be able to complete this system. It looked very interesting, and their previous blog entries showed how the mechs could be further integrated with the remainder of the game. Hopefully, they will be able to introduce other interesting features, such as an expansion to the main story and new biomes, dungeons, and missions. In the future, they may also be able to use the bounty system for existing features, including the story or the colony system.